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Jeffrey Goldberg promises that former Vice President Kamala Harris’s forthcoming book detailing her condensed 2024 presidential campaign, 107 Days, is “blunt, knowing, fervent, occasionally profane, [and] slyly funny.”
Some cynical pundits have pointed out that the book, like most political tomes, was likely written by a “slyly funny” ghostwriter. Well, whoever wrote it certainly captured the essence of Harris. Indeed, I don’t love her prose because I’m a reader or a writer, but despite those things.
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Here, for instance, Harris is relaying the reaction to a speech she delivered in Indianapolis to a group of black sorority women on restoring Roe v. Wade:
“‘When I am president—’”
A roar erupted that drowned out the rest of that sentence.
“That roar told me they could see it. Clearly, for the first time. This could be, and it should be. It was not because of gender or because of race, but despite those things.”
This is beautiful, swirling, self-aggrandizing gibberish. At some point in her life, Harris convinced herself that earnestly and dramatically unfurling tautologies makes her sound like Martin Luther King Jr.
Does anyone believe that hundreds of educated black women had just realized that Harris, who had been installed as the presidential candidate by the ruling party, who had entire institutions like mass media mobilized for her cause, may end up in the White House?
The problem with the excerpt isn’t the writing; it’s the martyrdom complex. She portrays herself as a victim of her party and circumstance — and, of course, misogyny. But even the expert offers numerous clues that the candidate was unprincipled and in way over her head.
Harris props herself up as a straight-shooting, righteous team player. Yet, she also admits to abdicating one of the basic duties she had to the nation. She maintains it would have been unseemly for her to tell a mentally incapacitated president that it was irresponsible to seek another term, arguing that “it would come off to him as incredibly self-serving if I advised him not to run. He would see it as naked ambition, perhaps as poisonous disloyalty, even if my only message was: Don’t let the other guy win.”
Even in this version of the event, Harris is obviously self-serving. The only reason for her to speak, she says, was that she was the preferred presidential candidate, not that it was negligent to allow a man in obvious cognitive decline to continue to make decisions for 350 million Americans. This man’s condition, not incidentally, was being hidden from the people by his handlers, journalists, and the vice president.
There was little evidence, of course, that Harris would outperform former President Joe Biden. And if her “only message” was that beating President Donald Trump entailed the only means of preserving democracy, why, when she had the chance, did she not insist on an open primary to ensure the best candidate ran?
Perhaps elsewhere in the book, Kamala will explain why she felt such deep loyalty to a group of people she accuses of undermining her personally. Harris notes that the White House rarely bothered defending or brandishing her impressive résumé to deflect from the slew of attacks she endured. Harris, for example, grouses over the Biden administration’s refusal to shield her from Fox News attacks, which picked on her “tone of voice,” laugh, her previous dating life, and accused her of being a “[diversity, equity, and inclusion] hire.”
Well, her grievance about being tagged a DEI hire is a tacit admission that race- and sex-based hiring practices degrade a person’s accomplishments and career. But how could Biden defend her from a charge that was true? In 2019, candidate Biden promised he was looking to pick someone “of color and-or a different gender” as his running mate. During the 2024 campaign, he said “diversity, equality, inclusion are literally — and this is not kidding — the core strength of America,” adding that it starts at the “top” of his administration with the vice president. There is no record of Harris objecting to this framing — quite the opposite.
An anonymous former Biden official recently told Axios that Harris “had basically zero substantive role in any of the administration’s key work streams, and instead would just dive bomb in for stilted photo ops that exposed how out of depth she was.”
It reflects quite poorly on the president that he chose to install such an incompetent person only one heartbeat away from the most powerful job on the planet. But even when the White House did give her face time, Harris shirked her responsibilities.
“When Republicans mischaracterized my role as ‘border czar,’ no one in the White House [communications] team helped me to effectively push back and explain what I had really been tasked to do, nor to highlight any of the progress I had achieved,” she says. Instead she “shouldered the blame for the porous border, an issue that had proved intractable for Democratic and Republican administrations alike.”
Harris both understates and overstates reality. No one ever expected the vice president to achieve much of anything on the border, and Harris, as always, rose to the occasion. Conservative commentary mocked the notion that the then-vice president had either the power, aptitude, or desire to mitigate illegal immigration. They were right. Harris, after all, still calls the border problem “intractable,” despite the Trump administration’s significant cut of illegal crossings in only a few months.
Harris is correct to note that Biden had only tasked her with the meaningless job of figuring out the “underlying causes” of the migrant crisis. Why would millions pick up and move from historically corrupt, poverty-stricken Banana Republics to the United States? You know, I have a few guesses! Harris’s answer was climate change.
Hard to believe she lost the election, right?
Is it true that Harris could never find her voice working in the Biden administration? Perhaps. Then again, one could argue that the more voters were exposed to the vice president, the less popular she became. Indeed, when she was handed the nomination, Harris was notoriously cautious about giving interviews, unless they were tightly curated. The New York Times even felt compelled to caution its readers that, though Harris was very talented, extemporaneous speaking was not “one of her strengths.”
Which is why her handlers hid the candidate from any authentic interactions. Harris could have appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast and spoken unfiltered for three hours. That would have been a perfect platform to debunk GOP talking points and make right the alleged injustices of the Biden era. She could even have separated herself on policy issues from the unpopular president.
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Far from “blunt, knowing, fervent, occasionally profane, slyly funny,” Harris could barely make cogent policy arguments, often wandering off into platitudinous verbal dead ends, perhaps because she staked her claim on identity rather than ideas. In many ways, she embodies the vacuousness of an establishment Democratic Party that’s lost both direction and energy after losing to Trump again. A yawning emptiness is bound to be filled. Which is one reason the far Left is ascendant. Say what you will about socialism, at least it’s an ethos.
Or as Harris might say, “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”